Smith advises students to consult the student guide and read the example proposal before applying. "Multiple proposals are allowed but we highly recommend focusing on quality over quantity," said Smith, adding that "The mentoring organisations have many proposals to review, so it is important to follow each organisation's specific guidelines or templates".

According to the Events and Timeline page for GSoC 2012, accepted student proposals will be announced on Monday 23 April at 19:00 UTC, after which the students will be paired with and will get to know their mentors – coding will begin on 21 May. Students who pass all of their exams will receive $5,000 from Google for participating in the program, while mentoring organisations receive $500.

Each year since 2005, Google has offered university students stipends to write and develop code for various open source projects as part of its GSoC event, which takes place over a period of three months. Over the past seven years, 6,000 students from more than 90 countries have completed the GSoC program. Last year, over 1,100 students participated by writing code for 175 open source organisations, 50 of which were new to GSoC.